Under construction...May 22nd,24th 2009.
Overview
In this essay, I will briefly summarize the interaction between childhood memories, 'ego-splitting', 'transference dynamics', and 'personality structure'. I will use the example of Freud's earliest conscious memory to demonstrate the different points I make in this essay.
.......................................................................
Part 1:
'Childhood ego-splitting' -- through one-time memory experiences and/or through more prolonged relationship contact -- is intimately connected to the childhood experience of 'rejection' which we all have to go through in some fashion or another, which in turn is connected to such intra-psychic and inter-personal phenomena as: transference splits, transference complexes, and transference neuroses.
This is the one place where DGB Philosophy-Psychology differs significantly from Adlerian Psychology and takes a more Psychoanalytic-Jungian-Transactional Analysis-Gestalt perspective into personality theory.
Which is not to say that Adlerian Psychology is left out of the equation with DGB Philosophy-Psychology. Quite the reverse. I learned a lot from Adlerian psychology -- concepts like 'lifeststyle', 'inferiority feelings', 'superiority striving', and 'the interpretation of conscious early recollections'.
However, there is a significant difference between The Adlerian Paradigm and the paradigm of the rest of these more 'dialectic-conflict' models of the personality (Freud, Jung, Berne, Perls...) mentioned above.
There is a difference between what respectively labelled as: 1. 'unilateral wholism'; 2. 'dialectical wholism'; 3. 'multi-dialectical wholism'; and 4. 'integrative pluralism' (as opposed to non-integrative, alienated, 'dialectical split pluralism').
My problem with the Adlerian model -- which in this crucial way resembles the Spinozian model of the world (and there are a lot of things that I like about both Adler and Spinoza but not this aspect of their respective philosophies) -- is that it is 'too idealistically non-divisive'.
My experience with the human personality is that for the most part it is 'conflict-ridden' because there is essentially a conflict in the personality between 'authoritarianism and unilateralism' on the one hand, and 'democracy' on the other hand. This is no different than within any business organization. Within any human social, economic, political, and/or religious organization -- period.
There is no such thing as 'human interaction without conflict' -- without 'differences' between indviduals striving to come together integratively in a relationship -- or not.
You get differenct 'personality styles'. Some people strive to 'will to power' their ideas to dominance. Well, actually, we all do -- except some people do it better than others in either healthy and/or pathological ways, some people are -- to put it simply -- more 'forceful' than others. In contrast, some people -- a lot of people -- strive to avoid conflict, to pretend that conflict doesn't exist, to hide conflict, to distance themselves from conflict, to give up a significant part of their identities to basically 'fake' agreement -- Gestalt Therapy calls this 'confluence' based on 'retroflection' where a person basically 'swallows his or her self-assertion' in the goal of 'avoiding conflict', 'pleasing the other', and/or 'following authoritarian orders'.
These types of 'inter-personal' and/or 'inter-social' between people -- and the way that these conflicts are either expressed or not expressed -- are essentially no different than what happens inside the personality as well -- these are what we might call 'inter-psychic' conflicts and/or 'conflicts between different ego-states that essentially have different philosophical goals, different psychological goals, different agendas...within the realm of their own 'part-function' compartment, department, or 'psychic-organ' of the personality.
Thus, we can have 'dialectic wholism' or 'multi-dialectic wholism' or 'pluralistic wholism' within the personality -- just as within a social organization, political organization, financial organization, and/or religious organization -- that is basically 'functioning on all cylinders' with all of the different 'ego-states' in the personality coming together in a show of 'multi-dialectic unity and wholism'...and this can be a very powerful, healthy state of affairs in the personality providing that the personality is being propelled in a 'wholistic-healthy' direction. If it is being propelled in one direction towards an ending of self-destruction, well, that is a whole different matter.
However, the more common state of affairs, is that we are all in a state -- even when we show differently -- of dialectic and multi-dialectic conflict division. This state of 'divided affairs' in the personality can also be referred to as 'ego splits'.
Ego splits -- at least the long-term, chronic, serial, obsessive-compulsive and addictive ones that are connected to 'transference conflicts, transference complexes, and transference neuroses' -- are generally formed in early childhood, let us say usually between the age of about 3 and 8 years old. I take an Adlerian point of view here and do not go looking for transference conflicts 'in the womb' for example like some psychoanalysts and non-psychoanlysts have, or between a baby and the mother's breast (Melanie Klein) although, to be sure, it is probably quite likely that a baby can 'intuitively pick up very quickly' on the overall 'accepting, loving' and/or 'rejecting-denying' attitude of the mother which became the foundational underpinning of Melanie Klein's 'Object Relations-Transference' model of the personality. Actually, Melanie Klein's incorporation of Freud's 'death instinct' concept made this 'internal division', this 'internal ego-splits' inevitable in the personality regardless of the nature of mother-infant relations, which is further than I feel comfortable going with this idea.
I would prefer to say that there is a 'rejection function' within all of us that is designed to 'protect our self-boundaries'.
Having said this, some people have much stronger 'rejecting functions' than others -- and it is the geneology of this rejecting process, this rejecting state of affairs, that tends to become intimately intertwined with the whole 'transference phenomenon' (transference memories, transference splits, tansference fixations, transference complexes, transference neuroses...).
People with stronger, more assertive, rejecting processes in psychoanalytic terminology tend to often be described as having more 'anal-retentive' and/or more 'anal-schizoid' personality types vs. the opposite -- the more 'flexible, accepting, loving, nurturing, encouraging -- 'oral-giving' or 'oral-receptive' -- personality type.
In DGB Philosophy-Psychology, these two 'personality types' are actually in all of us in different degrees of dominance and suppression ('personna' and 'shadow'), and in different degrees of self-assertion, self-confidence, self-power...
Integrating the work of Eric Berne (Tranactional Analysis) and Fritz Perls (Gestalt Therapy), DGB Philosophy-Psychology has put together these four initial, basic ego-states in all of us:
............................................................................
A DGB Working Model of The Personality
1. The Nurturing Topdog ('maternal', 'oral-receptive', 'oral-giving', mythological Greek Gods: Hera, Gaia));
2. The Righteous-Rejecting Topdog ('paternal', 'patriarchal', 'anal-rejecting', 'anal-schizoid'...Greek Mythological Gods: Zeus, Apollo);
3. The Approval-Seeking Underdog ('stereotyped, traditional feminine-passive', 'pleasing', 'accepting', 'submissive to authority', 'masochistic', 'oral-receptive', 'oral-giving', 'co-operative', 'trusting', 'naive', 'good child'...);
4. The Rebellious Underdog ('anal-rejecting', 'anal-schizoid', 'anarchistic', 'destructive', 'deconstructive', 'spontaneous', 'creative','wild', 'out of control', 'bad child', 'rule breaker'...often connected with sensuality and sexuality, hedonism..., Greek God: Dionysus, Religious Anti-God: Satan)
To these four ego-states above, DGB Philosophy-Psychology has also added these below:
5. The Narcissistic Ego (which is actually intertwined with all the other ego-states);
6. The Altruistic Ego (which also can be intertwined with all the other ego-states in either a 'dominant' and/or a 'suppressed, marginalized' -- 'personna' vs. 'shadow' -- state;
7. The Dionysian Ego (often intertwined with both 'The Rebellious Ego' and 'The Narcissistic Ego' with an emphasis on power, egotism, sensuality, and/or sexuality...);
8. The Romantic Ego (Greek Gods: Eros, Aprodite; emphasized in its process by the Romantic Philosophers such as Spinoza, Rousseau, Goethe, Schelling...);
9. The Economic Ego (dealing with all things financial, monetary; main philosophers of dominance: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Erich Fromm, Ayn Rand);
10. The Physical Health/Nutritional Ego (dealing with all matters pertaining to physical health, exercise, nutrition, medicine...)
11. The Darwinian-Survival Ego (Dealing with the greatest 'survival urgencies' within the confines of the personality);
12. The Epistemological-Ethical/Humanistic-Existential Ego (Integrating Epistemology with Ethics; Enlightenment Philosophy with Romantic Philosophy; also dealing with the issue of meaning and/or meaningless in the process of living);
13. The Spiritual-Religious Ego;
14. The Central Mediating, Executive (Hegelian) Ego (All final decisions in the personality run through The Central Ego...);
15. The Dynamic, (Symbolic, Fantasy, Creative-Destructive) Subconcious Ego (Freud, Jung, Perls...);
16. The Personal, Experiential Template and Network of Transference-Lifestyle Memories (Freud, Adler, Jung, Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Kohut, Berne, Perls...);
17. The Genetic Subconscious Mythological and Archetype Template (Jung);
18. The Genetic, Subconscious Potential Self (Jung);
This model combines:
A/ DGB Integrative Transference Theory...with
B/ DGB Integrative Personality Theory...with
C/ DGB Integrative Philosophy...
D/ The first four ego-states are definitely 'Object Relations', 'Transactional Analysis', and 'Gestalt' influenced;
E/ The fifth ego state (The Narcissistic Ego) is definitely Freudian influenced;
F/ The sixth ego state is closest to the Adlerian concept of 'social interest';
G/ The seventh ego state is from Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy';
H/ The eighth ego state -- 'The Romantic Ego' -- is from the period of Romantic Philosophy;
I/ The ninth ego state -- 'The Economic Ego' -- is from the economic Adam Smith/Karl Marx dialectic duet;
J/ The tenth ego state -- 'The Physical Health Ego' -- is from the philosophy of science and medicine -- we all need to learn and properly know how to look after our body or deal with the consequences of either not knowing and/or not caring sufficiently;
K/ The eleventh ego state -- 'The Darwinian Survival Ego' -- refers to both our specific ability and confidence in dealing with ego and life crises in dire emergencies, as well as the general, overall 'evolutionary intelligence' of each individual in terms of 'surviving with a flourish' -- and helping others to do the same;
L/ The twelfth ego state -- 'The Epistemological-Ethical Ego' and/or 'The Humanistic-Existential Ego' -- overlaps and/or is a redundancy relative to key functions of 'The Central, Executive Ego' but we will draw specific attention to these primary functions of The Ego in this ego state here as well;
M) The thirteenth ego state -- The Religious-Spiritual Ego -- refers in my particular case, and in the case of DGB Philosophy-Psychology to my Spinozian-Pantheistic influence although for others this may range anywhere from 'deep religion -- healthy and/or unhealthy' to 'Agnosticism' (not knowing whether God exists or not) to 'Atheism' (not believing in God);
N/ The fourteenth ego state -- is a combination of Hegelian, Freudian, and Transactional Analysis influence
O/ The fifteenth 'ego state' -- if you want to call it that -- is perhaps nothing more than The Central Executive Ego when it is asleep/we are asleep but still conscious enough to think in terms of dream language, mythology, and creative-destructive symbolism;
P/ The sixteenth ego-state -- or 'Transference-Lifestyle-Memory Template' -- is full of unrealized transference complexes 'busting to get out of the subconscious' and expressing themselves in terms of symbolic-creative-destructive serial behavior patterns. Influences include Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Karl Jung, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Kohut, Berne, Perls...;
Q/ The seventeenth ego state and/or mythological template leans upon the influence of primarily Jung, but also partly Erich Fromm (The Forgotten Language);
R/ The eighteenth and final ego state and/or genetic talent-potential template -- 'The Self' in Jung's psychological terminology -- leans again on the psychology of Jung in terms of its influence on DGB Philosophy-Psychology.
..............................................................................
Part 2: The Influence of Object Relations on DGB Philosophy-Psychology
It seemed that Freud was starting to take his work in a new direction just before he died as exemplified by his last two or three papers that seemed to be pointing Psychoanalysis in a more 'Object Relations' as opposed to 'The Instincts and Their Vicissitudes' direction. What does this mean?
It means a lot. It was perhaps the beginning of what would become a decisive turning point in the direction of Psychoanalysis, or alternatively, the birth of the sub-school, 'Object Relations', within the larger school of Psychoanalyis. Melanie Klein and Ronald Fairbairn would lead the way but just before them was Freud's final essays which seemed almost to harken back of the earliest work of Pierre Janet which was a little different than Freud's earliest work with Charcot, the unconscious, and repressed memories.
From a DGB perspective, the concepts of 'the unconscious' and 'the repressed' are very troublesome, ambiguous, if not bogus concepts. The concepts of 'subconscious' and 'dissociation' sail much better with DGB Philosophy-Psychology.
Let me briefly explain.
..............................................................................
Pierre Janet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pierre Marie Félix Janet (May 30, 1859 - February 24, 1947) was a pioneering French psychiatrist and philosopher in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory.
He was one of the first people to draw a connection between events in the subject's past life and his or her present day trauma, and coined the words ‘dissociation’ and ‘subconscious’. He studied under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Psychological Laboratory in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, in Paris. In several ways, he preceded Sigmund Freud. Many consider Janet, rather than Freud, the true 'founder' of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
He first published the results of his research in his philosophy thesis in 1889 and in his medical thesis, L'état mental des hystériques, in 1892.
In 1898, Janet was appointed lecturer in psychology at the Sorbonne, and in 1902 he attained the chair of experimental and comparative psychology at the Collège de France, a position he held until 1936. He was a member of the Institut de France from 1913.
In 1923, he wrote a definitive text, La médecine psychologique, on suggestion and in 1928-32, he published several definitive papers on memory.
Whilst he did not publish much in English, the fifteen lectures he gave to the Harvard Medical School between 15 October and the end of November 1906 were published in 1907 as The Major Symptoms of Hysteria and he received an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1936.
................................................................................
Off the internet...see PEP Web....(Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing)
Freud, S. (1938). Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence.
Welcome to PEP Web!
Viewing the full text of this document requires a subscription to PEP Web.
If you are coming in from a university from a registered IP address or secure referral page you should not need to log in. Contact your university librarian in the event of problems.
If you have a personal subscription on your own account or through a Society or Institute please put your username and password in the box below. Any difficulties should be reported to your group administrator.
Not already a subscriber? Order a subscription today.
Freud, S. (1938). Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937-1939): Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, 271-278
Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence
Sigmund Freud
.................................................................................
Off the internet...see Freud and Splitting.....
FREUD AND SPLITTING
J. A. Brook
Summary
Freud is the bread and butter of this paper and clinical vignettes provide some filling in the middle. First we examine Freud's discussions of splitting, using clinical vignettes. It turns out he discussed all three of the major kinds of splitting: dissociated or split-off psychic groupings, splitting of objects and affects, and splitting of the ego, though not always in contemporary terminology. I then focus on the kind of splitting which most interested Freud late in his life, splitting of the ego, and explore a clinical example. Finally, we examine the history of the development of the idea of the splitting of the ego in Freud's work. Though he only laid down the term 'splitting of the ego' in 1937, he discussed the phenomenon itself repeatedly throughout his life, beginning as early as 1909. By the end of his life he may have been edging toward viewing it as the foundation of all defense.
Splitting is often linked particularly to borderline and severe narcissistic conditions. Freud shows us that kinds of splitting not distinctively associated with such serious pathology are also important.
The various things called splitting in psychoanalysis can be sorted into three major types, though any such typology will draw clearer lines than we find in the actual clinical material, where mixed types are common. Historically, the first type of splitting to appear was the splitting off of what Freud called separate psyche groupings or ego nuclei (cf. 1894, 46, fn.1 for references). This form of splitting is commonly linked to dissociative states and was exemplified for Freud by the way highly integrated but completely unconscious psychical material operates in post-hypnotic suggestion. It was this form of splitting that led Freud to the phenomenon of repression.
A second type of splitting and the next to appear historically is the splitting of objects and affects into good objects (or part objects) of affection and bad objects of hostility. When psychoanalysts talk of splitting, this is the type of splitting they most frequently have in mind. The same sort of splitting is involved when the sense of self splits, too, though in other respects object splitting and splits in the sense of self are quite different from one another. Since what actually splits in these cases are representations, I will follow Lichtenberg and Slap (1973), Blum (1985) and others and call this type of splitting the splitting of representations. Note that at least three different kinds of representation can split, representations of objects, representations of affects, and representations of self.
A third type of splitting and historically the last to appear is the splitting of the ego. This is the type of splitting which most interested Freud late in his life. Freud used the term 'splitting of the ego' as a general term for a number of specific forms of splitting, both neurotic and psychotic. As applied to neurotic splitting, he used the term to describe both the splitting of the psyche or ego into a self-observing component and an acting component and the splitting which consists of adopting two or more opposed or conflicting attitudes to a single event or object. The latter, the splitting of attitudes, is the form of splitting which most interested Freud late in his life. From now on,
-----------------------
Presented to the Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society, September, 1989. Levin Prize Essay, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, 1991. I am grateful to those who have heard the paper and to anonymous referees for this journal for helpful criticisms and suggestions.
when I speak of splitting of the ego, this splitting of attitudes is what I will
have in mind.
Freud made comments about splitting throughout the whole of his forty-five years of writing about psychology and psychoanalysis. At one time or another, Freud discussed all three types of splitting I have just identified, though he discussed the splitting of representations only three times and the specific form of it which we call the splitting of the sense of self only once. Moreover, he discussed each of the three types separately, which is some indication that he thought they are different from one another. His remarks on splitting can be grouped into three periods, each of them centred on a different type of splitting. The first is 1893-5. In this period, his main interest was the splitting off of 'psychic groupings' from the rest of the psyche (which remains integrated), a subject which continued to interest him for the rest of his life (at least one reference to it occurs as late as 1934-1938, 77-78(1)). The second period is 1915 to 1925. In this period Freud discussed splits in representations three times (1915a, 1923, 1925), the only times he ever referred to this type of splitting in any work. The third period is 1927 to 1938. It was in this period that Freud identified splitting of the ego as a distinct phenomenon (1938a, 1938b). Though he had been describing occurrences of this form of splitting at least since the Rat Man (1909), he did not give it a separate name until 1937. However, he used a closely comparable term in 1924 (p. 153). In this period, virtually all Freud's remarks on splitting concern splitting of the ego, the splitting which consists of taking up opposed and contradictory attitudes to a single object or event. In the end, Freud seems to have thought that this type of splitting is more important than either of the other two. As we will see, there are some good reasons for taking this position.
In the first part of the paper, I will explore what Freud had to say about each of the three major types of splitting, with clinical illustrations. Then, focussing on the splitting of the ego, I will give a vignette from an analysis of a man I will call Mr. B., in which this form of splitting played a significant role. Finally, in a purely historical discussion, I will explore how the idea of the splitting of the ego developed in Freud's work and briefly point to some implications this discussion may have for Freud's final conception of the basic mechanism used by the defenses in general.
See the website...Freud and Splitting by J.A. Brook for the rest of this paper...
........................................................................
From the internet...Freud and The Splitting of The Ego...
Splitting of the Ego
Psychoanalysis: Splitting of the Ego
Sponsored LinksIndividual Therapy
Healing through personal reflection Read my Q&A for more info
www.andrewbenedetto.ca
The term "splitting of the ego" refers to a division of the ego into two coexisting parts, one of which satisfies instinctual demands while the other heeds the objection, in the shape of a symptom, which reality raises to that satisfaction. This process, which Freud described as a "ruse," constitutes a temporary response to the conflict, but the price paid is an inner rent in the ego that can only get worse with time.
For Freud the most striking instance of the splitting of the ego was to be observed in the perversion of fetishism, but it was also at work in the psychoses, and to a lesser degree in neurosis. It represents a position with respect to reality more complex than denial (or disavowal [Verleugnung]), for it implies the coexistence of two contradictory attitudes. The notion of the splitting of the ego was probably already present in embryo in Freud's mind well before his paper on "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence" (1940e [1938]). Thus the idea of a "plurality of psychical persons," identifications, and in a more general sense the institution of the ideal mental agencies (superego, ego ideal) are so many forms of splitting of the ego—although it should be noted that in the last case the outcome is the formation of a new agency rather than the maintenance of a split within the ego itself.
It was above all in the context of the psychoses that Freud developed this idea, and especially with regard to paranoia and delusions of reference. Viktor Tausk also worked in this context in his discussion of the genesis of the "influencing machine" in schizophrenia (1919/1949). Similarly, Sándor Ferenczi (1933) pointed out that traumas experienced by the child might give rise to a dissociation of a kind that would enable the adult, later, to present an appearance of perfect adaptation concealing an ego in ruins. In Freud's view, psychosis implied a break with reality caused by an irreconcilable idea: thanks to the mechanism of delusional projection, what had been abolished within the mind reappeared in the outside world in the shape of a hallucination.
The full dynamic complexity of the splitting of the ego emerged, however, only in the context of fetishism. Unlike a hallucination, a fetish was created not by a denial of reality but rather by a subtle avoidance of it, thanks to the symbolic transfer of the absent penis onto some other part of the body. This was the dividing-line between perversion and psychosis. But the splitting of the ego also signaled the ego's failure to build constructively on reality-testing by interpolating, between the instinctual demand and its gratification, the consequences of the envisaged course of action, whether the repression of the demand or the postponement of its satisfaction.
Bibliography
Ferenczi, Sándor. (1949). Confusion of tongues between adults and the child: The language of tenderness and of passion. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30, 225-230. (Original work published 1932)
Freud, Sigmund. (1927e). Fetishism. SE, 21: 147-157.
——. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psycho-analysis. SE, 23: 139-207.
——. (1940e [1938]). Splitting of the ego in the process of defence. SE, 23: 271-278.
——. (1950a [1887-1902]). The origins of psycho-analysis. Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1: 173-280.
Tausk, Viktor. (1948). On the origin of the "influencing machine" in schizophrenia. In Robert Fliess (Ed.), The psycho-analytic reader. New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1919)
Further Reading
Blum, Harold P. (1983). Splitting of the ego and its relation to parent loss. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 31(S), 301-324.
Lichtenberg, Joseph D., and Slap, Joseph W. (1973). Concept of splitting: Defense mechanisms; representations. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 21, 772-787.
Pruyser, P.W. (1975). What splits in "splitting"?: Scrutiny of concept. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 39, 1-46.
—SOPHIEDE MIJOLLA-MELLOR
...................................................................................
A DGB Editorial on 'Transference Complexes and The Splitting of The Ego'....
To be continued...
I will go back to a 'DGB Transference Memory Interpretation' of one of Freud's earliest conscious memories to demonstrate how a DGB approach to 'Transference Complexes and The Splitting of The Ego'...based on my combined integrative Freudian-Adlerian-Jungian-Fairbairnian-Transactional-Analysis-Gestalt influence...
This morning, I am leaving on a two week vacation to visit my parents in Prince Edward Island and my daughter in Nova Scotia. I shall be back by June 5th/09. Hopefully, I will get some writing done on my trip, as I am just getting 'heated up' on this most fascinating of psychological topics...
Til I can find a computer on my trip...
-- dgb, May 25th, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain
